A libertarian news aggregation service.

Main menu

Sub menu

African Economist: “For God’s Sake, Please Stop the Aid!”

Economist James Shikwati of Kenya unloads on the Marxist apparatchiks at the UN. This guy had me rolling. The article is dated July of 2005, but it’s so choice I just had to dredge it up from the way-back machine. I saw a link to this posted on Information Liberation and felt it deserved its own write up here.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Shikwati, the G8 summit at Gleneagles is about to beef up the development aid for Africa…

Shikwati: … for God’s sake, please just stop.

Shikwati: …This call then reaches the United Nations World Food Program — which is a massive agency of apparatchiks who are in the absurd situation of, on the one hand, being dedicated to the fight against hunger while, on the other hand, being faced with unemployment were hunger actually eliminated.

Shikwati: … and they flood our markets with that stuff. We can buy these donated clothes cheaply at our so-called Mitumba markets. There are Germans who spend a few dollars to get used Bayern Munich or Werder Bremen jerseys, in other words, clothes that that some German kids sent to Africa for a good cause. After buying these jerseys, they auction them off at Ebay and send them back to Germany — for three times the price. That’s insanity

I want to marry this guy and have his babies.

In all seriousness, African aid programs have never been about actually helping Africans. They are about ensuring the African wild west never matures beyond the fetal suckling stage.

You don’t think the powers-that-be know full well what these aid programs do? Do you actually think they are creating and distributing all this money because they are benevolent benefactors who simply want to see poor Africans get ahead in life? Do you think they are simply misguided in their attempts to help the Africans?

You’ll have to excuse me while I spray coffee out my nostrils laughing hysterically at such a notion.

EVERYONE – from Bernanke at the Federal Reserve to Josette Sheeran at the World Food Program – knows exactly what the economic effects of their programs are. And those economic effects are total economic destruction.

The same “benefactors” that brought you welfare ghettos for blacks in the United States are hard at work making sure the other brown people in this world get no further than a hand-to-mouth existence at the hands of tyrannical oligarchs. They are all extreme racist bigots who see it as their duty to engage in what can be classified as global genocide.

Think of the hubris these aid programs demonstrate on the part of their organizers. They are the same as saying – “Without hand-to-mouth welfare, the blacks would all starve to death! Only through our benevolent programs are the ignorant and incapable blacks even managing to maintain their own existence! If we cut off aid, the black people are so ignorant and stupid they would surely all die a horrible death!”

The reality of the situation is that Africa is so loaded with resources that if the blacks were allowed to work out property rights for themselves and the welfare bucket was yanked away, they would quickly organize to become one of the most powerful economic forces on the planet. The States in Africa are relatively small and decentralized, which means low government overhead for businesses. The dictators and warlords that have run Africa in to the ground are only able to remain in power because of aid programs like the WFP. They confiscate the aid and sell it, or ration it out to their cronies. Without our “aid” they would get tossed out of power overnight.

Dambisa Moyo pulls no punches. International aid to Africa has failed, she says. It hurts rather than helps. It does not equip individuals for the world. It destroys rather than empowers local leaders. Not a single country on the continent has become prosperous or stable through aid. Aid creates failed states rather than rescuing them. The situation is deteriorating not improving. An entire generation of young Africans is growing up in states which don’t work and in states where there is no work. The consequence is civil strife and the breakdown of order. Things will get worse, not least because the west cannot sustain its aid policies during the recession. The developed world should set a five-year deadline to stop aid altogether.

I find Moyo’s views shocking considering her background. I pretty much assume that anyone who was trained at Oxford or Harvard in economics is a total fucking idiot. But in her case, she seems to have escaped with her marbles still intact.

How pervasive are the problems at the World Food Program, the largest hunger relief agency in the world and the United Nations agency responsible for food aid? It’s a $2.9 billion question—the amount of direct aid disbursed by the WFP. A significant part of its budget comes from U.S. contributors, and USAID coordinates some of its work through the WFP.

It’s been a month since the leaking of a scathing evaluation of WFP’s Somalian relief program written by the UN Monitoring Group on Somalia. The body, created by the UN Security Council, alleges that three Somali businessmen who held about $160 million in WFP transport contracts were involved in arms trading while diverting the agency’s food aid away from the hungry. A New York Times report also claimed food was being siphoned off by radical Islamic militants and local UN workers.

More recently, Columbia trained economist Jamil Nasir pointed out how US aid money to Pakistan is typically spent in this Daily Times article:

Donors will give aid to the government as far as a dominant majority of the people is mired in poverty. This implies that for a corrupt government or ruler, poor people are an asset.

The composition of aid indicates that it has skewed towards security-related aid especially in the past one decade, implying that it is not the people of Pakistan who are the direct beneficiaries of US aid. The aid money does not stay with the people of Pakistan. It is either dissipated in the air as the smoke of fired bullets or goes back to the US to buy arms, F-16s, missiles and technical expertise. Hence further vindication of the point that the people of Pakistan are not an important variable in the determination of US aid, rather it is the US interests in the region that matter.

While Nasir is a communist who thinks things would be better if we simply gave people more handouts, he correctly identifies the fact that most aid never makes it to the serfs.

And the list rolls on. In fact I could rattle off dozens of articles by Austrian economists who obviously point out the same things Moyo, Nasir, and Shikwati are saying.

But I don’t expect anyone to listen.

Your masters have told you that aid is good, black people are stupid, and they need your help.